Crass?

6/30/2014

At a certain point, as I was working with a lot of Jazz and urban artists, I was called upon to work with Arista records. One of my first projects was to work with English artists Graham Parker and the Rumour who were on tour promoting their latest album "Squeezing Out Sparks". The record has been hailed as a classic, and it is an excellent record, yet it failed commercially. Graham recently appeared in the Judd Apatow film "This Is Forty" as a metaphor for failure.I ended up spending many evenings with Graham and the band as they toured with Journey. One night after performing at COBO HALL in Detroit, Graham and I were sitting in the dressing room having a conversation , when Journey began performing vocal exercises in the next room. Graham stopped what he was doing looked up and shouted " Shut the F*** up you crass M*****F******".
Then, with out missing a beat, he continued his conversation. I glanced at his road manager who shrugged as if to say 'Oh well, that's Graham'.
I never saw a bad performance by Graham and the Rumour on that whole tour. They closed with "Soul Shoes" every night.

1 Comment

unome2L

7/3/2014 05:12:02 am

That was one of those shows where most of the audience (Journey fans) were filing in, milling about, or just not paying attention to the opening act, in general. There were a few Graham fans there, but they were too diffuse throughout the crowd, not anything the band could feed off of during the set. The band was tight and it was all the great songs from SOS, but the show just lacked that connection with the audience. Maybe it was just too large a venue, maybe it was the wrong pairing on the bill, I don't know, but that is my memory of a band that has been under-appreciated all these years. For the record, I enjoyed them way more than Journey.

Crass?

Leave a Reply.

Jeff Allen

Categories

Store

Archives